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Publicitymedia: Putting BAFTA’s Image Archive Online

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts – BAFTA to most of us – has a mission to identify, reward and celebrates excellence, while providing many opportunities for the public, industry practitioners and emerging talent to find information and inspiration through its year-round programme of events, and initiatives.

For more than 60 years it’s been amassing an impressive archive of still photography from Britain’s film, TV and video games industries that it now needs to make it more available.

Considered by many to be a hidden national treasure, the BAFTA stills archive will be one of the first major collections on the Publicitymedia.com platform when it launches in January 2013.

For months now, we’ve been working with the photography experts in BAFTA’s archive team to make the collection far more easily available to BAFTA’s staff and partners.

Currently, finding and sourcing archive images for reports, publications or BAFTA’s growing number of web projects is a slow, manual job for the archivists.

With the size of the digital archive currently nudging a terabyte and the team’s determination to acquire and commission more photography, the problem was only going to get worse.

But with the image archive on Publicitymedia – complete with instant preview, full metadata and secure sharing, the pain and stress is taken out of sourcing and sharing individual images from the collection.

BAFTA is a charity and has to have one eye on costs and benefits at all times.

With no upper limit for storage, nor for the number of administrators, colleagues, partners or journalists that BAFTA can have on the platform, the organisation is free to use the archive to further its objectives and reach more people.

As Publicitymedia is browser based, BAFTA doesn’t have to buy, upgrade or maintain any extra computer or networking kit, licence any software or pay for extra “seats” on the system as their use of it grows. And like everyone using the Publicitymedia platform, all distribution of BAFTA’s digital assets to whoever they choose, wherever those contacts are, is completely free.

The next stage is to upload the entire archive to Publicitymedia and we’ll bring you more on this project as it happens…